Cultural Translation and Hybridisation

Iran, ID LLCE2016-354; In recent years, the idea of ‘cultural translation’ has been increasingly used across a wide range of disciplines in the humanities, enabling them to focus on the dynamic processes of interaction among different cultures that appear to characterize our contemporary era. The metaphor of translation has been particularly utilized in the relatively new fields of Postcolonial and Migration Studies as a means of considering the wider effects of the ways in which cultures are transmitted and developed in different contexts, either historically through the operations of colonial expansion and the consequent global diaspora of millions of people, or more recently through the processes of globalization, immigration and the movement of refugees. The concept of cultural translation seems to offer a means for thinking about the ways in which cultures are transported, transmitted, reinterpreted and re‐aligned through local languages, and more broadly through other cultures with which migrants come into contact, as well as articulating the realities of how individuals on both sides experience and interpret such encounters in the ‘contact zones’ between different cultures. These have become the focus of recent postcolonial theories of translation which have given particular attention to the questions of power, of resistance and of domination. In this paper, we will address the parameters of what, in its basic formulation, is a very simple question: what is the relation between the practice and theory of translation to the idea of the translation of cultures, or, as it is often referred to, ‘cultural translation’.